Spanish Village Art Center

Mission: "To conduct and operate Spanish Village Art Center as a community art center where artists and craftsmen may work and exhibit, to stimulate public interest in arts and crafts, and to raise the aesthetic standards of the community by means of exhibitions, demonstration, lectures and classes."

Annual operating budget: $85,000

Governance: 20 member board of directors (comprises 14 artist members and six representatives from the artist guilds at Spanish Village); Elizabeth Woolrych, president

Maybe the city should have let artists plan the 2015 Balboa Park Centennial.

While the official planning committee disbanded several months ago amid public concern over its lack of progress, the members of the park’s Spanish Village Art Center have a solid plan in place for their part of the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Panama-California Exposition.

“Watch, Learn, Play on the Creative Edge” at the Spanish Village promises a yearlong celebration highlighting a different theme or discipline each month, whether April’s “Sculpture Month on the Patio” or an October “Balboa Park Past, Present and Future in Color Pencil” show.

The plans include several all-member exhibitions that will showcase the approximately 250 artists involved in the Art Center. The organization, which is part of the Balboa Park Cultural Partnership, represents the artists and their affiliates who lease the 37 artist studios or display their art on the patio in a 70-year-old corner of Balboa Park originally devoted to curio sellers and other concessionaires.

“Because we are part of a single organization, versus individual studios or galleries spread along a street, we can do powerful things like plan for 2015,” said Sue Britt, one of the organization’s board members and co-chair of its centennial committee. “We can start dreaming up events that groups of artists can come together and collaborate on.”

If “Edge” sounds vaguely familiar, the regionwide Centennial Celebration was originally branded “Edge: 2015” around the theme of innovation. The concept was eventually scrapped, but it continued to resonate for several park institutions, including the Art Center.

“When that innovation theme for 2015 came out, we said, ‘OK, how do the arts fit in there?’ ” Britt said. The answer was easy: The arts are the embodiment of creativity and a model for innovation.

BALBOA PARK CENTENNIAL

Profiles of Balboa Park and its top museums, in advance of the park's 2015 anniversary.

“A lot of people think of artists as just making things,” Britt said. “And really what we do is propose problems, and then we solve them. That’s our process, and that’s very similar to innovation.”

Getting organized

The Spanish Village, with its idiosyncratic, eclectic assortment of artists and craftsmen, was not always a model of organization and collaboration. When the Art Center’s current president, Elizabeth Woolrych, arrived in Balboa Park in 1980 to consider helping out a friend who needed someone to temporarily sublet her studio, Woolrych’s colleagues advised her against it.

“I was working in Ocean Beach, and all my pottery friends said, ‘Oh, that place. They are sort of quiet, and there’s a lot of old people there,’ ” said Woolrych. “I didn’t get very favorable recommendations. But I came anyway.”